Scholarly Editing Internships (March 1 Deadline)

If you are thinking of pursuing a career in the field of documentary editing, you may find the following opportunities of interest:

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project has offered summer internships since 1995. Graduate and undergraduate students from universities in the U.S. and Europe have worked with the editorial staff on our microfilm, book and digital publications and received broad experience in historical research and editing. The Project is located in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village, in the History Department of New York University.

For 2012, we will be offering internships related to our book, digital, and web outreach projects. While most of our internships are arranged during the summer months, we can arranged internship during the academic year as well.

We ask that interns be familiar with IBM-based computers, using Windows, have good research skills and the ability to do careful and detailed work. A background in history, women’s history, the history of medicine, and XML encoding are desirable. This is a popular program and we often receive far more applications than we can fill. Candidates for these positions are ranked based on the Project’s specific needs.

Book Edition Internship

The Project is finishing up its research on Volume IV of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, covering the years 1920-1966 and focusing on Sanger’s efforts to create a global birth control movement. Interns will work under the supervision of editors, conducting research on specific topics, tracing people, places, events and issues covered in the documents. The research will be used to produce annotation and introductory material for the volume. Research will be conducted in the Project’s offices, using the comprehensive microfilm edition and other primary sources, as well as at local libraries and with resources available on the Internet. Because we are almost finished with the volume research, we anticipate only one or two openings here this summer.

Digital Internships

We continue work on our digital edition of Sanger’s speeches and articles, focusing on texts written by Margaret Sanger from the 1940s through the 1960s. Interns will be taught to encode transcriptions using XML/TEI encoding, draft subject index entries for the documents, and conduct research to verify dates, titles, and publication information, or to identify the names of people, organizations and books mentioned in the documents. Digital interns will also work with the Project editors on copyright clearance for the texts, and will continue to search for additional Sanger texts. We anticipate having multiple internships here this summer.

We are also looking for a digital humanites programmer looking to gain experience working with TEI texts. The existing interface for the Speeches and Articles needs revisions in its display properties and we need to add additional search criteria that have been encoded to the search screen. The existing site was written using XSLT and PHP. For more information about the existing software see Matt Zimmerman’s 2003 Connect article.

Web Outreach Internship

We are also looking for interns to help with our web presence for the Project, utilizing digital tools such as our Facebook site and research blog, and website analysis to draw attention to the project’s work and connect with our audiences. For this internship, familiarity with history, HTML and the web is required.

For more information about the Project and for information on how to apply, please consult the Sanger website or e-mail cathy (dot) hajo AT nyu (dot) edu The deadline for summer internship applications is March 1.